Readers,
I was walking through Madison, Connecticut, on Wednesday evening and heard a house finch singing. For the first time in months, songbirds other than house sparrows have returned. Despite the life-pausing blizzard, despite the fluctuating cold, despite midterms and thesis drafts and a hundred plays and concerts, the birds once again sing their gorgeous song into the evening’s oncoming moonbeams.
Like sandbars, moonbeams have lost their reputation. Unlike sandbars, however, it is not because they have dropped from common consciousness, but because they have exploded. Two songs, equally notable and popular, include them as core to their lyricism: “Gold,” by Glen Hansard from the musical Once, and “Mystical Magical,” by Benson Boone, from the musical that is his life. Neither context really makes tremendous sense: in the former, Hansard describes love as like “walking on moonbeams / staring out to sea.” In the latter, paired with ice cream, moonbeams are metonymic to the larger idyllicism of being in love.
Love is for the evenings—we all know this—so the moon must be romantic. Hanging over the sky, it provides a certain subtle ambience to falling in love. Dim but fluorescent, lightening without glare or fear of burning; there is a softness to the moon, a sweetness. It’s so far, so much less accessible than the sun, more mysterious. But still, it reaches us, by way of those moonbeams.
In what is perhaps our most exhausted metaphorical stretch yet, let’s imagine the Herald as like a moonbeam. Journalism is a moonbeam: taking large and mysterious concepts and condensing them sufficiently into something accessible. Michelle So takes what this winter’s snow has done to us and bottles it inside 300 words. Angelica Peruzzi saw a play, thought about the crisis of masculinity, and distilled it all into 1,500 words. Jaxon Havens explains Yale’s fashion culture, its issues around race and exclusion, and what can be done about it, all in under 3,000 words.
So grab a pint of ice cream, take off your blue jeans, and go for a walk with us along these moonbeams.
Most daringly,
Will and Oscar
